Newsbooster is convinced that its practice is legal. It
publishes the headline and a very small part of the ingress, while
providing a link back to the actual story, and clearly gives credit
to the individual news publisher. The practice is common on the
internet.
However, the Danish daily newspapers' trade political
organisation, which counts all of Denmark’s daily newspapers as its
members, has a policy of seeking court orders to stop news sites
that systematically deep link to its members’ stories. It only
wants links to the homepage of a newspaper’s web site, saying that
the deep linking of Newsbooster “violates common principles of when
and where to cite a source.”
The usual commercial objection to deep linking is that the
homepage carries a site’s most prominent branding and that links to
internal pages mean that the newspaper loses out on potential ad
revenue – the value of which is likely to be proportional to the
quantity of traffic to the homepage.
Legally, the objections include copyright infringement and
passing off – where the user of a third party site is led to
believe that the target story is written by the third party site or
in some way affiliated with it.
Jeppe Kruse, a writer for Danish news site Magazine.dk, observes
that the concern of the DNPA is not uncommon in smaller European
countries where a site’s number of potential users is restricted to
those who speak the language.
Kruse explains that the most popular sites in Denmark are run by
those “who have been making print newspapers for decades.”
He continues:
"What they fail to realise is that good
content in itself is not enough. Most users don't want to read in
depth, but to overview the entire daily spectre of news. Users want
it indexed, packaged, and delivered to their in-box, and a lot of
them only read the headlines without following links anywhere. When
more and more users adopt this stance, the packaging and indexing
becomes just as important as the actual production of news. And
those who actually produce journalistic content have two options:
They can either try to recreate the market conditions they've had
for centuries, and thereby interfere with basic principles of
information on the web - or they can change. Until now, the
majority have chosen the first option."
According to Newsbooster, most sites when threatened by the DNPA
simply comply with its request to avoid a court battle. Newsbooster
says it is prepared to fight, arguing that it adds value to
newspapers by sending them traffic they would not otherwise
receive.
The case is continuing in the Copenhagen City-Court.
